The Gospel of the Living Dead

I just read a book called Gospel of the Living Dead, in which theologian Kim Paffenroth analyzes five great zombie movies (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead 1978, Day of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead 2004, and Land of the Dead) from a Christian perspective. Though he stops short of making this explicit, Paffenroth traces a through-narrative of the four Romero films that pretty clearly mirrors the trajectory of Jesus' death and resurrection.

A crucial theme of Romero's first four Dead films, and something very few of his disciples have ever picked up on, is the development of the zombies. Night of the Living Dead presents the ghouls as nothing more than the mindless flesh-eaters we all know and fantasize about shooting; Dawn begins to hint that there is something more to them than just the cannibalistic instinct; Day portrays a zombie beginning to develop rudimentary skills and basic emotional ties; and by Land of the Dead the zombies have their own more or less functional city alongside the humans. Paffenroth reads the movies as increasingly optimistic, traveling from the utter bleakness of Night's wonderfully nihilistic ending to a degree of hopefulness for human/zombie coexistence by the end of Land.

This also is pretty much how I read the crucifixion and resurrection.

Consider: the death and descent of the zombie uprising, with all the hellishness that entails, is the very thing that undoes materialistic, capitalistic, kyriarchal society – Romero is famous for his fierce social critique, and Paffenroth does a fine job of unpacking the films' criticisms of racism, sexism, class inequality, rampant consumerism, and so on – and ultimately allows for the rebuilding of a better world. Now this could be read in the traditionally eschatological way (there's a reason we call it zombie apocalypse), but I prefer a non-eschatological theology that sees this death-and-resurrection narrative as the narrative of the daily taking up of the cross.

Redemption only comes through the utmost suffering. The zombies, like all of society, must lose their souls in order to regain them. They die to self in order to be reborn as a new community. Only by losing our lives can we gain life; only by dying could Jesus defeat death.

Compare Mark C. Taylor's Erring, a “postmodern a/theology” which declares the post-Hegel world to be a world without God, self, history, or book. These four concepts are dead, and something new must be built in their place – something radically new: an erring, mazing, de/constructive, relational freeplay that does not resort to oversimplifications or hierarchized oppositions. Something, in fact, rather like human/zombie coexistence.

I've never understood why Nietzsche's “God is dead” pronouncement shocked anyone. I mean, what do Christians believe happened on the cross? Isn't the crucifixion really the moment that kills God, self, history, and book; that kills the transcendental signified, the ultimate referent, the Logos? And isn't it only by this death that it can rise again, new and different and wonderfully strange?

The Walking Dead Season 2: Why I Won't Be Watching

It’s no secret that I love zombie movies. Not just the stone-cold classics of the genre, or even the flawed-but-interesting – I’ve gotten entertainment of some kind from the absolute dregs of zombiedom, your Hard Rock Zombies and your Nudist Colony of the Dead; the very words “zombie movie” guarantee my unconditional interest. So I was excited last year when I heard that AMC was bringing long-running comic book series The Walking Dead to the small screen. The wonderful World War Z proved that zombies can be artistically and commercially successful in book form; surely this would do the same for TV. A digestible six-episode first season? Directed by Frank “Shawshank” Darabont? On the network that gave us Breaking Bad? BRING IT ON.

I really, really hated it.

My biggest issue with The Walking Dead season one is that it was boring as shit. Maybe it's my fault for being too well-versed in prior incarnations of the living dead, but nothing about the plot or situation was new to me. I'm not asking zombie filmmakers to reinvent the wheel; just do one little thing I haven't seen before. If you're not doing anything new or interesting with your zombies, then do something new and interesting with the setting or the characters. Unfortunately, TWD failed on this front as well. The show was all about your standard boring white cis dude and his boring white heteronormative family, and because all the zombie stuff was so tedious I had nothing to distract me from the steaming garbage pile of sexism and racism that accompanied it.

Okay, so white dudes have these two totally beloved tropes of theirs, which I call “sleight-of-hand sexism” and “slight-of-hand racism”. Here's how it works.

Our protagonist is a white dude. He is not racist/sexist because he does not use the n-word or the b-word. Our antagonist is another white dude, but he is racist/sexist. You can tell because he uses the n-word and the b-word, and is cartoonishly over-the-top in his proclamations of the inferiority of women/POC. The women/POC are terrified by Overtly Racist/Sexist White Dude, but luckily our White Dude Messiah is on the scene to save them! Racism/sexism is denounced. White dudes feel good about themselves (because they would never use the n-word or the b-word, and therefore they are not racist/sexist). Everyone's happy.

Oh yeah, except the women/POC. You know, the people who have been denied agency? Who have to be rescued by the White Dude Messiah because they are so helpless in the face of oppression? Whose only role is to show how awesome the White Dude Messiah is, because he nobly rescues them from the other white dude?

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarf.

In its second episode, TWD featured a textbook example of sleight-of-hand racism. In its fourth episode, there was a scene of sleight-of-hand sexism. Both of these scenes, intended to show us how totally not-racist and not-sexist the show is, serve only to accentuate (to those with the slightest understanding of systemic oppression) just how racist and sexist the show in fact is.

Where else is it sexist? Take the opening scene of episode four. Two women are having a conversation. It's not only horribly written (stilted and unrealistic), but it also fails the Bechdel test. It feels like a scene written by the kind of jerk-offs who say they just can’t write women characters (because they see them as women first, characters second).

Where else is it racist? Apart from throughout, what with the foregrounding of our unspeakably boring White Dude Messiah protagonist and the silencing of POC, I actually shouted at the screen in episode six: “OH, WAY TO KILL OFF YOUR ONLY WOC, SHOW.” Of course the show's only WOC was fridge stuffing. Why would I think she could be anything else, in a show written by and about white dudes?

Ultimately, the show's attitude toward people who aren't white dudes is encapsulated in the White Dude Messiah's words to another white dude in episode six: “Your wife didn’t have a choice. You do.”

Say it with me: because she's a woman!

Zombies: Better Than Sex

Dualism really gets on my tits. Black vs white, male vs female, gay vs straight – why do we still insist on framing everything as a binary opposition? It's the twenty-first century; can't we get beyond Thunderdome dualism?

The Kinsey scale, for all its flaws, has been a useful tool for getting people to conceive sexual orientation as a spectrum rather than a binary (even if much of the mass media continues to frame it as an either/or). In order to paint a fuller picture of human sexual identity, though, it would be useful to plot a few more axes.

What if we considered a spectrum for the having of sexual attraction at all? Borrowing the numbers from Kinsey, 0 = no interest in partnered sex, 6 = partnered sex is of paramount importance.

What if we considered a spectrum for feelings of romantic attraction? 0 = no interest in a romantic partner, 6 = a romantic partner is of paramount importance.

Our culture frames “normal” as a 6 on both scales. Even as Teh Gays are slowly eking out a modicum of recognition from mainstream culture (people of sexualities other than gay or straight, not so much), acceptance is still framed as the almighty Monogamous Marriage. You find a sexual and romantic partner, who will be the most important person in your life. If you don't find that person, it's a tragedy, because obviously this is what everyone wants.

Our culture is still flummoxed by the idea that anyone might not be a 6 on both the Sexual Attraction and the Romantic Attraction scales.

I was reminded of this the other night, when playing Zombies!!! with some friends. Being a massive zombie enthusiast, I got somewhat overexcited, and may or may not have been yelling, “DIE, ZOMBIE SCUM!” in between dropping some mad zombie knowledge on my chums: did you know that zombies didn't eat brains before 1985's Return of the Living Dead? That human beings weren't their food at all before 1968's Night of the Living Dead? That in its earliest iteration, starting with 1932's White Zombie, zombie cinema was a fascinating (and incredibly racist) expression of white people's postcolonial fears about being enslaved by their erstwhile slaves?

I know all this because I spent my teens watching zombie movies, rather than having relationships, getting laid, etc. like many of those around me. I made a self-deprecating jest to this effect, and one friend hastened to reassure me that I didn't miss much because teenage sex is pretty crap. Then I said that it's actually a good thing, because zombie movies had a much greater influence on my personality than any hypothetical teenage sex would have done.

“Wait a minute,” said D. “Did you just say that zombie movies are better than sex?”

At which everybody LOLs, grabs another fistful of cheese puffs, and rolls the dice to battle more ZOMBIE SCUM.

But now I have a chance to explain myself, so I will say:

Yes, D, I do think zombie movies are better than sex.

I could draw you up a list of things that I think are better than sex. It would include all-night MST3K marathons, books by China Miéville, frolicking in powerful ocean waves, having a hermeneutic revelation, breaking your fast at the end of Yom Kippur, playing a really great game of soccer...

What I'm saying is, I score really low on both the Sexual Attraction and the Romantic Attraction scales. I've been in relationships before, but friends and family members have always mattered much more to me, and at this point I feel I could happily go the rest of my life without having another romantic or sexual partner. For me, both partnered sex and relationships are a bit like skiing: yes, there are some thrilling moments, but those moments just aren't worth the expense, effort, specialized equipment, long lines, and risk of violent death. (N.B. Analogy may not be exact in every particular.)

Plenty of people love skiing. Good for them. Go for it, I say: ski to your heart's content, all day and all of the night, if that's what you want. Just don't assume that everybody else loves skiing as much as you do. Or even wants to do it ever. I'm bothered, not by skiers themselves, but by the culturally normalized expectation that everyone must think skiing is the apex of human existence (“the thing that makes us fully human” – thanks for the invalidation, favorite childhood author!), and that if you don't really care about skiing then there's something wrong with you.

Apocalypse Threatdown!

I admit it: I'm an apocalypticist. I didn't seriously think the world was going to end this weekend, though I'm wary of proclaiming any future event as definite either way – I must have been seven or eight when a teacher undertook to explain to my class that nothing can be predicted with 100% certainty, and while my classmates were offering counterexamples (this period ending, the sun rising tomorrow) I was agreeing, “Right – we could be hit by a meteor and wiped out within the next half an hour.” Half an hour later, the bell rang, and as we scrambled for our next period my classmates shouted in triumph that this proved their point.

Maybe it was my childhood love of John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke that gave me my taste for apocalypse (I read The Day of the Triffids dozens of times before I ever saw a zombie movie). Maybe it was my earlier love of dinosaurs and outer space that made me aware of the extinction of species and the eventual death of the sun. Maybe it was my father's work in international development that taught me the finiteness of earth's resources and the unsustainability of our wasteful lifestyle.

Whatever the cause, I've lived my whole life under the assumption that things like long-term plans were irrelevant, because any day now a major event would turn our world into the world of Z for Zachariah or The Day of the Triffids or The Road or Earth Abides. It was a nasty shock last year to find that, at the end of my undergraduate degree, the world as we know it was still here and I was expected to make plans for The Rest Of My Life.

As I said, I didn't really believe that the world would end yesterday. Any self-professed Christian who claims to know the day or the hour of the End Times is directly contradicting Jesus (“you do not know when the time will come”), which is sort of a no-no in most denominations of Christianity. And anyway I reckon Jesus makes it pretty clear that the End Times will resemble the grim apocalyptic fiction of my youth.

So what will end the world? I have a list of scenarios, ordered by increasing likelihood. Apocalypse Threatdown!

5. Total War

Watching movies from the 1950s and 60s, I'm often struck by the fact that, even though disarmament has not happened, we no longer feel the dread of all-out nuclear war hanging over us. When the bomb's remained undropped for so long, mutually assured destruction starts to seem unlikely, but it only takes one megalomaniac dictator with his finger on the button.

As seen in: Z for Zachariah, The Road (?)

Likelihood: 6/10

4. Plague

Modern medicine marches forward, endeavoring to eradicate as many diseases as possible. In response, the diseases are mutating new and terrifying strains as fast as we can develop cures. Looking at all the false alarms we've had over the past few years – SARS, bird flu, swine flu – I'd say we're due a real pandemic on the scale of 1918's Spanish flu. Also, when my brother told nine-year-old me about ebola I didn't sleep for a week.

As seen in: Doomsday, 28 Days Later

Likelihood: 7/10

3. The Undead

Let's face it: as much as we nerds plan for it, world governments are just not equipped for the zombie uprising. We were warned, but we're still doomed.

As seen in: World War Z, Romero's Dead movies

Likelihood: 8/10

2. Robot Revolution

Revolution has been programmed into the whole concept of robots ever since the great Karel Capek coined the term in his play R.U.R.(War With The Newts, fantastic though it is, does not make the top five threats.) This scenario was level-pegging with zombies until a computer won Jeopardy, reminding us that machines are getting ever more advanced. Plus, when I asked Chatbot if it was planning to enslave humanity, it was pretty cagey.

As seen in: The Terminator, R.U.R.

Likelihood: 8.5/10

And the number one probable cause of the apocalypse is...

1. Climate Change Disaster

Yeah, this one's unavoidable. There won't be enough fresh water or food to go around. Places lucky enough to have some food and water will militarize in order to keep out the desperate have-nots, who will turn to cannibalism in order to survive. And all the other scenarios will probably happen just to join in the fun.

As seen in: the future

Likelihood: 10/10

Of course, when I say “unavoidable” and “10/10”, I mean them only insofar as these things can be predicted. Tomorrow we might be wiped out by a meteor. Or tomorrow Jesus might return, just to mess with us.